Читать книгу The Risk of Returning, Second Edition - Shirley Nelson - Страница 11

I had planned to take a taxi to an inn and present myself at the Escuela Méndez early the next day, a sensible Monday morning. But “sensible” had lost a good deal of its meaning, and I needed to walk. I crossed an open-air market, through the smoke of grilling food and shouting hawkers, and entered a business district, where a courteous man gave me directions. That put me on a residential street. Adobe houses in pastels fronted directly on the sidewalk. Heavy flowering vines draped over the walls from inner courtyards. It was suddenly quiet. I smelled coffee.

The school address was a hacienda of sorts, a large stucco house surrounded by a flower garden and enclosed by an iron fence. A brass bell hung on a rope, but before I could ring it, a security guard in a brown uniform appeared from under the shadow of a tree. “School?” I asked. “Méndez?”

He eyed me carefully through the gate, without speaking. It occurred to me that there might be another inspection, my paraphernalia spread on the grass, books and all. And if I were to frisk him in turn, would that bulge in his side pocket be a pistol? Like an answer he went for it. I tightened. But it was only a rolled up notebook. He wet his finger. “Llama?” he asked. “Nennen? Nom?”

I could match that. “Jag heter Peterson,” I said, with my Scandinavian (third generation) throat. He found me somewhere in the depths of the notebook, then led me through the carved front door into a large treed courtyard set up with tables. Rooms opened off on all four sides, with wall-sized blackboards. In the office the guard gestured me to a seat, mumbled something into an intercom and handed me a phone.

“Professor Peterson!” said a hearty voice. “Carlos Méndez here. Welcome to Guatemala. So glad you made it safe and sound.” English. British schoolboy accent.

I apologized for barging in on a Sunday, and he to me for the country’s communication services. “There have been a few strikes, you see, work stoppages, mail and telephone off-kilter.” I was enrolled, no question. Everything was “hunky-dory,” he said. He had a tutor waiting for me, a very fine tutor, and a place for me to tuck myself in, “a nice middle-class home with a nice Ladino family.” He would be around in just a moment to wrap things up and take me to my residence.

He came “around” through a side door into the office. A small trim man, Hispanic in appearance despite the British accent, pulling a large napkin from his neck and running his tongue over his teeth. I had interrupted his breakfast. This estate was apparently his home. He pulled out my file, checked my ID, passport and immunization shots. I paid for three weeks, with a fourth reserved as an option.

Then he bustled me into his car, a clean black late-model Lincoln, which he drove with great care through the narrow streets, his eyes just reaching over the steering wheel.

“Are you a family man, Professor Peterson?” he asked.

I answered with only a split-second delay. “One daughter, in college now. My wife’s daughter, that is.” Still my wife, at the moment, on paper.

“Good,” said Méndez. “Because there are two teenagers in this home. They will also be your instructors, if you let them.”

We stopped in front of a house similar to those I had just passed, where we were greeted effusively in Spanish by Don Francisco Ávila Espinoza, his wife, Doña Rosa, and Marco and Juanita, their kids, all four on the plump side. The smell of roasting meat filled the house. I hadn’t smelled a Sunday roast since I lived with my mother in Rhode Island. It made me vaguely uneasy.

“You are in good hands, Professor Peterson,” Méndez said, patting me on the arm, and left.

The Ávila parents turned me over to the kids, who gave me a tour of the first floor: a parlor (“La sala, señor”) with overstuffed furniture and a television set considerably larger than my own, a formal dining room (“El comedor”), the table covered with a flowered plastic cloth, and a tiny inner courtyard (“El patio”) grated overhead but otherwise open to the sky. Cement statues of saints, all with eroded noses, circled a tiled pool. A parrot perched on the head of one of them. “Mandatory parrot,” said Marco, without a trace of accent. “What’s his name?” I asked. “Polly,” he said.

My room was on the second floor. The kids insisted on carrying my bags up the narrow staircase, and I gave in for fear of offending them. They led the way, Marco with the suitcase and Juanita with my pack over her shoulder. Halfway up, out of earshot of their parents, Marco stopped and set the suitcase on a tread. “Caramba!” he gasped, wiping his brow with his sleeve. “Excuse my French, señor.” Juanita was staggering ahead, hamming exhaustion. In the room she collapsed into a chair, her hair over her face. “Dios mio,” she gasped. “You see what life ees like in dees contry?”

“Que sera, sera,” I said, applauding.

When they were gone, I unpacked, clothes to the hangers on the back of the door and into the one dresser drawer in four that actually slid open. The room was tiny, shared disproportionately with the Holy Family, dolls dressed and bewigged on top of my bureau, Mary holding the baby. I deposited the straw hat over their three heads. A single bed lined the opposite wall, an intrusive piece of furniture with head and footboard. There were two windows, one to the street and one opening into the courtyard. Down there the parrot whistled and called. I could have sworn she said “I’m Elvis Presley.”

I was feeling a little better. Or so I thought until I encountered the last item in my suitcase. I had layered a gray sweater across the bottom. As I drew it out, the little room filled with a waft of Rebecca’s perfume. The sweater had not been worn for a full year but had retained in its fibers—as it seemed to me now—its last hug, before the hugging ceased. She had come up behind me as I stood at a window. I lifted it with both hands and buried my face in it for a long time, breathing deeply, until the scent negated itself and vanished. Then I returned it to the bottom of the suitcase, which I shoved under the bed.

I considered calling her, finding a phone and just letting her know, a matter of civility, that I had arrived safely, had a room of my own and a pot to piss in. In fact, as the well-heeled owner and director of my classy escuela just told me, everything is “hunky-dory.” But it was not the time to call, not yet.